My new book, Capital
Crimes – Seven Centuries of London Life and Murder, is a leisurely stroll
through the life and homicidal history of the city from the Peasant’s Revolt of
1381 up until the 1950s, when the movement for the abolition of hanging was
about to achieve its goal.

I’ve written about crime before. My book Hardboiled Hollywood – The Origins of the
Great Crime Films (2003) dealt with a combination of classic crime novels,
crime films and a certain amount of true crime, while my slang dictionary, Straight From The Fridge, Dad (2000),
was riddled with underworld expressions drawn from real life, film noir, pulp
murder mysteries and other related sources. Capital
Crimes, however, is something different.

My publisher at Random House was interested in the
changing face of murder cases in London
down through the ages. I had covered a fair few US historical murder cases in Hardboiled Hollywood, so it was nice to
approach a selection of homicides that happened much closer to home, in the
city where I live. What also attracted me to the subject was the chance to
write about changing life in London
as the capital grew from a population of roughly 30,000 people to eight million
over the course of seven centuries. I did not particularly want to focus on the
lives of dead kings, queens, aristocrats or politicians – although inevitably
there are a few of them in the narrative. Instead, I was trying to conjure up
everyday experience of the vast majority of the population of London as the city overflowed its original
walled boundaries and successive changes occurred. The advent of newspapers in
the 17th century; the founding of the Bow Street Runners in the
mid-18th century; the River Police in 1798; the Metropolitan Police
in 1829; all mixed in with innovations such as the railways, the telegraph,
fingerprinting, telephones, motor cars, and then all the complexities of modern
forensic sciences. Each chapter is centred around one real-life murder case –
the killing of a Moorgate pub landlord in 1695, or a Shoreditch lovers quarrel
turned bad in 1887 – while building up a picture of life in the capital during
that era.

Five hundred years ago, if you killed someone in London, who would be
around to catch you, and how would they prove your guilt? Justice was random,
swift and inaccurately applied. Even in the 18th century, murder
trials at the Old Bailey could be done and dusted within an hour or less, and
the gallows at Tyburn must have claimed a fair few innocent victims of
circumstance and hearsay.

Labels are inadequate, but if you said that I write about
popular culture, you would be somewhere near the mark. To clarify that, I am
interested in trying to make sense of what is already long gone. I think too
many films and books present a view of previous decades as if things back then
were exactly the same as today, with the people just wearing funny clothes,
which to me is nonsense. I’m with L.P. Hartley on this one, ‘the past is a
foreign country: they do things differently there’. You have to try to
understand the mindset and respect the differences involved.

At first glance, you might think that my books are
sometimes quite different from each other. Obviously, the main link between
them as far as I am concerned is that they are all about subjects, which
interest me, and which I hope will interest other people. My last book, A Rocket In My Pocket (2010), was a
history of rockabilly music, so I’ve gone from discussing the Memphis music
scene circa 1955 to quoting Old Bailey trial transcripts from the 1690s, but to
me it all links together. How did it feel to be alive in that time, and what
were the ordinary people doing while those that were supposedly running the
place were squabbling about all manner of things whose importance has often
faded away to nothing with the passing of the years? Many people in the UK these days
would struggle to place the name Herbert Henry Asquith, but back in 1910, as
prime minister, he was leading a government that ran the largest empire the
world has ever seen. However, if you mention Dr. Crippen – hanged for murder at
Pentonville that same year – it is likely you will meet far more cries of
recognition.

I didn’t write about Crippen in Capital Crimes, because that particular story has been covered many
times elsewhere. Indeed, while I included one or two better-known cases, I
mostly tried to choose less familiar examples. The social history element weaves
in and around the criminal detection stories, so the book is not just a parade
of gory details – although several of the victims certainly met their ends in
brutal ways, such as the dismembered 1836 corpse found scattered to the four
winds in a chapter entitled East Side, West Side, All Around The Town. I have to say though
that it was not the blood that interested me, but the life of the city through
the centuries, and in particular its underworld.

Right now, I’m half-way through the writing of my next
book, which is again non-fiction, and takes me back to the world of colloquial
language like Straight From The Fridge,
although it is not a dictionary. If at first sight this might sound like a
shift away from all things criminal, that really isn’t the case, since a vast
amount of the really entertaining and durable expressions in the English
language has come not from occupants of Mayfair drawing-rooms but from the
shady gentlemen more likely to be found climbing through the recently-broken
windows of such establishments at 3.00 o’clock in the morning. Once again, my
real subject is the past, rather than the present, and the entertainingly
frayed edges of society, which exist a little bit past where respectability
ends.